1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to an apparatus, system and method for reporting field replaceable unit (FRU) replacement. In particular the present invention is directed to an apparatus, system and method for informing a user which FRUs, that may be the source of a system error, have already been replaced within a given period of time.
2. Description of Related Art
As computer systems get more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate a fault to a particular field replaceable unit (FRU), e.g., a network card, sound card, video card, modem, and the like. For example, several processor cards can plug into and make use of a common system bus where additional memory modules may also be plugged into the common system bus. If a fault occurs on a memory controller, the fault can appear to be caused by a fault on itself or one of the FRUs of the common bus.
Today, diagnostic tests and/or real time error detectors are used to detect and attempt to isolate the fault. These tests and error detectors provide a set of symptoms that are used in the fault isolation. When developing the diagnostics, each of the symptoms is mapped to a FRU bucket, i.e., a collection of probable FRUs. The ideal FRU bucket contains a single FRU. However, in reality, many FRU buckets will consist of more than one FRU since a symptom may be the result of a failure of any of a number of FRUs.
When a FRU bucket contains more than one FRU, the FRUs are listed in a failure probability order. This failure probability order is referred to as the FRU Replacement Order and typically lists the most probable source of a failure first in the FRU bucket with other FRUs listed in decreasing probability of source of failure.
When a failure is to be cured, FRUs are replaced one at a time in the order set forth in the FRU Replacement Order until the failure is cured and the failure source is identified. A problem exists, however, if a FRU in the FRU Replacement Order has already been replaced recently. The problem is that, in most cases, a system error could be intermittent. Thus, repeatedly replacing a FRU may make the problem go away temporarily but does not provide a permanent solution to the problem.
Furthermore, if there is more than one customer engineer working on a system, a second customer engineer may not be aware that a first engineer has already replaced a particular FRU only a few days, weeks, etc., before. Normally, customer engineers log their actions in a binder that is kept physically next to the system under repair. However, this manner of logging replacements of FRUs proves troublesome in that the log binder may be overlooked, lost, or not maintained in an up-to-date manner.
Thus, it would be beneficial to have a method and apparatus for reporting FRU replacement to a subsequent customer engineer. It would further be beneficial to have a method and apparatus for logging FRU replacement automatically such that the FRU log is automatically retrievable by a customer engineer. Moreover, it would be beneficial to have an apparatus and method for providing a customer engineer with a FRU Replacement Order that takes into consideration whether a FRU has been previously replaced within a predetermined period of time.
The present invention provides an apparatus, system and method for reporting field replaceable unit (FRU) replacements to a user. The present invention identifies a FRU Replacement Order for an identified system error and then determines which of the FRUs in the FRU Replacement Order have already been replaced within a predetermined period of time from the current time. Those FRUs identified as having already been replaced are then flagged. The FRU Replacement Order is then output to the user with the flagged FRUs being output in a different manner than the other FRUs in the FRU Replacement Order.